On July 1, 2016, we published Cash Management Electronic Announcement #2 that discussed the regulatory requirement that institutions with either a Tier One (T1) or Tier Two (T2) arrangement post to their website any contracts or agreements they have with a financial institution or other third-party to provide students with Title IV student aid credit balances. The Electronic Announcement also reminded institutions with T1 or T2 arrangements that they must provide to the Secretary the URL for the institutionally posted contracts or agreements so that we can include those URLs in a Departmentally developed centralized database that will be accessible to the public.

Institutions should have complied with these two requirements, posting of their T1 or T2 contracts or agreements and reporting the URL to the Department, by September 1, 2016. Institutions that have not yet complied with either or both of these requirements must do so immediately following the instructions in Cash Management EA #2.

As noted above, and in order to ensure that the public has information about institutions’ contracts or agreements for providing Title IV credit balances to students, the Department is providing a centralized database accessible to the public with the URLs of these contracts or agreements, as submitted by institutions. Interested parties may access the database here.

Information about each of the columns in the database is available in the ‘Field Definitions’ tab. Updates to the database will be made on a regular basis as institutions provide new or revised contract URLs. After September 1, 2017, the database will include the institutionally reported URL for information on: payments or other benefits received by and from the institution and its T1 and T2 partners; the number of student account holders under each contract; and, the mean and median fees assessed these account holders.